Author: Peter Jones, School of Social Work and Community Welfare, James Cook University, Townsville
Edition: Volume 46, Number 3, November 2006
Summary: Addressing the global environmental crisis will require both personal and social transformation. Adult environmental education will clearly play an important role in such transformative processes, but needs to broaden its target audience beyond those already involved in, or committed to, environmentalism to include other potential allies in this process. Social work is a profession characterised by philosophical and practical concerns with social justice and human rights. This paper argues that social workers also have an important, yet largely unexplored, role to play in environmental practice. To realise this potential, social work education needs to provide opportunities for the linking of conceptual and practical environmental issues to social work’s more traditional social justice concerns. This will involve the incorporation of forms of adult environmental education and ecological literacy into social work curricula. The author discusses how transformative learning approaches have been utilised in a subject on socio-environmentalism as part of a social work degree course.
Keywords: environmentalism, human rights, ecological literacy
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